Ten years ago in North Sinai, following the ouster of the then president Hosni Mubarak, *Ashraf, then a 15-year-old child, was accompanying his mother to stage a protest in front of one of the city’s burnt police stations in the Sheikh Zuwied district.
The protesters demanded the release of Ashraf’s father, who had been arrested in connection to the 2005 bombings that targeted South Sinai.
“While the whole country was celebrating freedom and democracy after Mubarak left, we were just starting to demand the most basic of our rights,” Ashraf, now a 26-year-old construction worker based in Suez, tells The Africa Report.
Economic and social marginalisation
Thousands of other North Sinai residents have for a long time been subjected to economic and social marginalisation in addition to radical state-sponsored violence like enforced disappearances, illegal arrests and extrajudicial killings.
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